Draco Detrimentum
by LilithBoadicea
Summary: Draco lies in the hospital wing, utterly defeated, until a visitor puts the heart back in him. For the Christmas FicAThon on the QuietOnes LJ comm. My prompt was MidHBP: Hermione goes to Draco to apologizemake excuses for Harry after the bathroom inciden


DISCLAIMER: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

**Summary:** Draco lies in the hospital wing, utterly defeated, until a visitor puts the heart back in him. For the Christmas Fic-A-Thon on the QuietOnes LJ comm. My prompt was "Mid-HBP: Hermione goes to Draco to apologize/make excuses for Harry after the bathroom incident. Stuff ensues; h/c stuff that changes the course of Draco's actions, or non-con stuff that fits in with HBP, or whatever else you think might happen. (Draco/Hermione Blaise optional)."

**Draco Detrimentum**

Weak. He felt weak, and cold, and as exhausted as if he had run the entire distance from the Astronomy Tower to his common room. His chest itched and prickled but it was easier to live with the crawling tingle than it would have been to lift his leaden arms for a scratch.

He lay still in the echoing emptiness of the hospital wing, feeling the itch and his cold dead weight. Cold and dead. It wouldn't be long before the Dark Lord knew just how incompetent he was, and then he would really knew how it was to feel cold and dead.

Couldn't even win a duel with Potter.

What a useless failure he had turned out to be.

A sodden, self-pitying little sniff rent the silence. He sounded just like Moaning Myrtle, and the comparison did nothing for his self-esteem. The door to the hospital wing creaked open and he hastily shut his eyes, feigning sleep. Probably Pansy coming back and he really couldn't face her at the moment: Pansy with her great limpid eyes full of hero worship, tears and righteous indignation. Seeing himself in those eyes was seeing the Draco he ought to be. Her enduring faith in him niggled his conscience uncomfortably.

Hesitant footsteps tread lightly through the wing and faltered at the foot of his bed. Small shoes creaked on tiptoe to the chair next to him and a slight frame settled softly into it. He willed himself into a statue of total repose, his breaths torpid and facial features slack. She would sniffle a bit, sling a few choice insults Potter's way she'd thought of too late for her last visit and leave.

He heard a sniffle. He knew her too well, by Merlin. There was a crinkling noise, a sense of movement close by, as if she had placed a wrapped present on his bedside table.

Then, in a breathless whisper, "They're Chocolate Frogs. I thought you might like them." But that wasn't Pansy's voice. He strained to hear more, to guess who it might be. That Greengrass bint perhaps? Couldn't be, she'd hated him ever since he turned her down for the Yule Ball in their fourth year.

"I… I'm really sorry," came that breathless whisper again. "I know it's really unbelievable – I mean, we've never been on exactly the best of terms."

No, definitely not Greengrass. And not that Ravenclaw fifth year either, whatshername, the one who kept following him in the corridors and making wistful moogly eyes at him during meals.

Then, still hesitant but a little stronger, as if plucking up her courage, "Of course, that could be just as much my fault as yours. I can't say as I've ever tried to be nicer to you, or wanted to, really. You're kind of a git, Malfoy." She carried on more sternly. "Actually, 'kind of' doesn't quite encompass what a vile little git you can be. Truth be told, you're an obnoxious, beastly, arrogant sod, Malfoy, and I'm extremely glad you're asleep right now else I'd probably want to finish the job myself before I had a chance to say my piece."

Granger? _Granger_ was coming to visit him in the hospital wing? What was this, some sort of set up? Bet she poisoned the chocolates, Potter would get a real kick out of that.

"But," she continued more softly, "even if I don't particularly like you, I'm sorry. Harry was wrong, what he did was horrible, and just because it was you he cursed doesn't excuse it. You're still a human being, and your family will be dreadfully worried when they hear you've been badly hurt. What with all the awful things in the papers… I'm sure your mother will leap to the conclusion that Vol-Voldemort went after you, to get back at your father for failing and getting so many of his followers arrested."

Her words hit him like a Stunning hex, sinking through his brain and echoing again and again. _"… to get back at your father for failing… to get back at your father for failing… to get back at your father for failing…"_ Sweet Merlin on a biscuit, the Mudblood was right. She had seen it – and like an explosion, he understood that his mother had seen it too - when he had not. There had never been a question that he might fail; he was intended to fail. His shocked sense of betrayal faded away and he was left feeling very old suddenly, very old and tired and full of loathing that he could ever have been so naïve.

"… been thinking about your mother. It must be… awful for her," Granger's voice mused gently. "In that lonesome house all by herself; her husband in Azkhaban as a Death Eater and wondering what road her son is on, whether he'll be safe and happy. Harry has the most ridiculous… well, I'll not go into that. But all mothers want a happy ending. My own Mum has been sick with worry, and she doesn't know the half of it. Whatever Harry and Ron think of you, your mother must love you, love you dearly. Do you think of her often, Malfoy? I know it isn't manly to admit it, but… do you think of your mother?"

It came to him suddenly, as suddenly and viciously as a lorry driving straight into a brick wall, that what he missed most about his mother was her smell. In every memory he summoned, there was this overriding aroma which gave him nostalgic lurches of long pale fingers caressing his cheek, the swish of expensive tailored robes, her laughter. Lying over it all like a fine patina glossing the surface was her scent: fine wool, the cedar of her clothes chests, ginger and jasmine soap. Mother might wear perfume – certainly did, Father must have given her litres of it over the years – but what he recalled was not a manufactured perfume so much as the collected notes which formed to smell like… Mother.

"I don't exactly know why I'm here," she continued, her voice sounding vaguely distressed. "I mean, clearly I never wanted you to be hurt but I… I don't like you. You don't like me. We'd never be having this conversation if you weren't snoring away-"

Madamioselle, a Malfoy does not snore. As if.

"-on whatever potion Madame Pomfrey gave you. I don't know – I've been thinking a lot on my mother lately, and perhaps that's why I thought of your mother, and how dreadful it must be to be someone's mother these days. Perhaps what I wanted," she said slowly, "was to ease your mother's mind by showing that someone cares; even if she doesn't know it. Perhaps one day someone will show me the same courtesy if it should be me lying in that hospital bed, and it would be my mother who would rest the easier even without knowing it."

She gave a light, rueful chuckle. "Ron thinks I have an obnoxiously wide do-gooder streak. It's a fair point. We have to _be_ the change we want to see in others though, don't you think? Someone has to be brave enough to be the first. Oh, Malfoy, I don't think you're a bad person. You're an excellent student, rather talented at times, and I'm sure you can be very likable when you want to be. One of these days you'll show us all, Malfoy; I'm not sure what exactly you'll show us, but it's just the sort of person you are. You're quite a determined fellow."

"I'm glad we had this chat, Malfoy, and I hope you feel better soon but I really must run. Potions class in fifteen minutes." He felt her hand, cool and rough-skinned, pat his wrist gently. The chair creaked with the sudden absence of weight and light footsteps tripped quickly down the hospital wing. The door hinges groaned and groaned again and she opened the door and shut it behind her, leaving him alone again in his bed. He opened his eyes at last and rubbed his wrist where she had touched him on the corner of his sheet. How revoltingly sappy of her. Those rose-coloured spectacles of hers must have been jammed on too tight, squeezing her already overtaxed brain. Granger believed in him, fancy that.

He lay there in his bed for perhaps another hour, thinking up several cutting things which he might have said to her and imagining deliciously how cowed she would have been. Thoroughly satisfied by this mental exercise, he turned over delicately so as not to stretch his wounds and closed his eyes to sleep – honest sleep this time, rather than a ruse. He drifted off with the scent of his mother in his nose and deep, deep, deep in his mind, in those moments between wakefulness and slumber, a stray, thoughtful sort of musing lodged itself in his brain. Though his mother would never have thanked the Mudblood, she would have been grateful. His mother would have understood the sort of fine devotion that sent one to the bedside of the enemy. Therefore of all the nitwits, blood traitors and poseurs on the other side, his mother - and he as well - could always…

Draco slept.


End file.
